The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 1,976 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 14 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Dixon: Top-performing VC firms have higher loss rates than lesser firms
“There's a lot of data in the VC industry that actually, interestingly enough, the best firms actually have a higher loss rate, meaning they lose money more frequently than the less.”
Charlie Munger told Zweig he fears the loss of media oligopolies
“Charlie Munger told me last year when I was at the Daily Journal meeting in Los Angeles that he really fears for the future of the Republic, as he puts it that newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times no longer have the, I guess I would s…”
Paribas gave Jacobs's early oil trading business a $1B credit line
“I deposited it with Banque Paribas, now it's BNP Paribas, back then it was Paribas, and they gave me a billion dollar line of credit, and I swung for the fences. I used sometimes up to nine hundred and ninety million dollars of that line of credit, doing count…”
Nejatian: Opendoor halved its operating expenses while maintaining previous transaction volume
“To give you a sense, the last time Opendoor bought as many homes as we bought last quarter, Opendoor's OPEX was more than twice as high.”
Nejatian: Opendoor is buying 6-7x more homes year-over-year by removing friction
“We're buying six to seven times more homes this week than we did last year this week. And it's almost entirely because we reduce friction.”
Valiante: Self-esteem is not empirically related to excellence
“And while it's important to have a healthy self-esteem, it's not empirically related to excellence in any way, shape, or form.”
Enders: Gut health often outweighs genetics in mental and metabolic health
“It's sometimes more potent than genetics.”
Enders: Dietary Fiber Protects Against Colon and Metabolically-Driven Cancers
“Fiber can protect you of colon cancer, for example, and then other cancers that are related to those metabolic processes that I mentioned.”
Dr. Giulia Enders: Stress hormones select for harmful gut microbes in studies
“And also some microbes, and that is maybe the most hygienic part of it all, they thrive on stress hormones. They are really able to deal with them very well, and others are not. You're kind of making an atmosphere for your gut. We're selecting gut microbes tha…”
Gurley: AI startups burn an order of magnitude more cash than Uber
“Why Amazon was, you know, they had a big burn rate, but then Uber took it to a new level but now it's had an, they've added a zero.”
Pincus: Only Zynga and Spotify survived Facebook's app ecosystem
“The entire Facebook experience for Zynga was a near-death experience, and not just us, for everyone in their app ecosystem, it was the least stable app ecosystem ever imagined or invented, and many companies did die in it. Most. There's only two companies that…”
Pincus: Zynga drove 20% of Facebook page views and 10% of revenue at IPO
“They gave it on Friday, and they said, you have till Monday to sign this agreement, or we're gonna take down your apps, which was their right and that could have happened the whole way through, and who knows what would have happened, because, you know, at this…”
Weinberg: GPT-3 Answered 86% of Legal Questions with Zero Edits
“On 86 out of a hundred of those questions, three out of three attorneys said yes, and that was the Oh my God moment for me and for my co-founder, or so we need to do something in this industry.”
Weinberg: Autonomous AI law firms are illegal in 48 US states
“Basically, there, there's two rules. One is state by state, which is the unauthorized practice of law. It's actually a felony. And so, you know, you actually need to be barred in order to give legal advice. And then the other one is an ethical rule. So it's by…”
Brockman: OpenAI's 10-year roadmap focused on RL, unsupervised learning, then complexity
“We came up with what I would Really say is almost the technical plan that we have pursued for the past 10 years. Number one, solve reinforcement learning. Number two, solve unsupervised learning. And number three was gradually learn more complicated, in quotes…”
Brockman: Altman, Pachocki, Sidor, Madry, and Brockman Charted New AI Venture
“There were a few of my close collaborators who quit that day as well. That's Jakob, Shimon, Alexander, and the five of us. So Those people plus Sam. We all got together and we started to chart out what a new company could look like.”
Brockman: Altman Asked Satya Nadella to Fund Venture Absorbing All OpenAI Staff
“Sam talked to Satya, who we'd been talking about. Hey, can you be a funder? Could you know, help, help support this new endeavor? I was like, Hey, actually, can we expand from the small life raft to like, yes, can we take everyone? And we're like, all right, w…”
Brockman: Global GPU production is nowhere near one GPU per person
“If you just wanted enough compute for, you know, you wanted one GPU for every person in the world, you're talking like eight billion GPUs. We are not on a trajectory to build anywhere near that level of compute, right? It's like, you know, hundreds of thousand…”
Liemandt: US Earnings and Educational Outcomes Are Less Correlated Than Globally
“In the U.S., there's a big disconnect between educational outcomes and your earning potential, which is they're not as tightly correlated. As they are in the rest of the world. Right. They're very tightly correlated in the rest of the world and not in the US.”
Liemandt: Multiple US states legally mandate teaching strictly at grade level
“There's actually laws in states, various states, that you must teach at grade level. Like, it's illegal for a teacher not to teach at grade level, right?”
Liemandt: All 11 college-bound Alpha School graduates got into first-choice colleges
“Our first class was, we had 12 graduates 11 of them went to college. The 12th is one of the world's best water skiers. And so he's building his media empire while he water skis. It was like, I'm not going to college. The other ones all got into their first cho…”
Teskey: The untapped retail market for alternative assets exceeds institutional sizing
“That market is actually bigger. The individual market is actually bigger than the institutional market today. And it has almost zero penetrations from alternatives.”
Tenev: Robinhood restricted GameStop trading for about one day
“We had to make a tough call to put GameStop and a bunch of other companies on position closing only, which basically meant you couldn't open up new positions, take on more risk for a period of about one day.”
Tenev: Harmonic's Aristotle achieved gold medal performance at the IMO
“Earlier this year, we actually achieved gold medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad, which is the world's most prestigious mathematics competition. These are like cracked high schoolers, like five people got perfect scores in the Internat…”
Tenev: The vast majority of Aristotle's training data is synthetic
“All of the data that the vast majority of the data that trains Aristotle is actually data that we generate. It's not, you know, internet data.”
Tangen: Americans factually work much harder than Europeans
“And then of course you work much harder in America. I mean, that's just not something I think. It's just like the facts. You got less holiday and so on.”
Security Pacific Banker Threatened Resignation to Force Home Depot Loan Approval
“He stormed into his CEO's office, slammed the door, and threw his resignation letter on the desk. You don't need a banker, he told the CEO. You need a computer. Hire some young kid to come in here and do my job. I buy people. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank are…”
Former Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli Resigned With $210M Severance Package
“He resigned under pressure With a two hundred and ten million dollar severance package that sparked public outrage.”
Sutherland: Trial Lawyers Heavily Fund US Democrats to Block Tort Reform
“Particularly because there's no tort law reform in the US, and that's partly because, I was told yesterday, trial lawyers are among largest donors to the Democratic Party because they resist any kind of tort law reform.”
Ogilvy Australia made only $350k on an idea that generated $1 billion
“There's an idea conceived by Ogilvy Australia. It has made that company in excess of a billion dollars in the last 10 years. It's still running. It runs in something like a hundred markets. Still useful today. For that idea, the agency in Australia got paid 35…”
Sutherland: Swedish Study Found Sunbed Users Had Higher Life Expectancy
“So there was a study, actually, among Swedes where there was a higher instance of skin cancer among Swedish sunbed addicts, but they actually had a higher life expectancy, which they didn't expect.”
Munger: Oil companies copied fertilizer acquisitions without reason, ending in disaster
“Big shot businessmen get into these waves of social proof. Do you remember some years ago when one oil company bought a fertilizer company? And every other major oil company practically ran out and bought a fertilizer company. And there was no more damn reason…”
Multiple early Sweetgreen investors sold their shares quickly after the IPO.
“I think that in the Sweetgreen IPO, We see a case where a number of the investors sold fairly quickly.”
Wozniak: Every computer prior to Apple I used front-panel switches and lights
“Every computer before the Apple One had a front panel of switches and lights, he noted. Every computer since has had a keyboard and a screen.”
Parrish: Apple I marked first time typing on a keyboard displayed directly on-screen
“He didn't realize it then, but this was the first time in history anyone had typed on a keyboard and seen it appear on their own computer screen.”
Parrish: Steve Wozniak Sold Cheap Pre-IPO Apple Shares to 40 Excluded Colleagues
“He took his own shares and sold them at a deeply discounted price to 40 colleagues. Who'd been left out after the IPO. He was giving away shares to people he felt deserved them. He called it the Woz plan.”
Parrish: Apple's Official Apple III Fix Was Dropping the Machine Onto Desks
“When customers called about system failures, technicians would tell them to lift the front of the computer three to six inches off their desk and drop it. The physical shock might reset the loose chips. The official fix for the computer worth thousands of doll…”
Parrish: Apple Lost Over $1 Billion on Apple III, Subsidized by Apple II
“In today's money, they'd lost at least a billion dollars on the Apple III, all of it subsidized by the Apple II's success.”
Scilipoti: Veritas Was the Only Sell Rating on Valeant in 2012–2013
“We wrote about Valiant. We said sell Valiant, ok? We're the only sell on, on Valiant in 20 12, 2013. The company didn't blow up until 2015, ok?”
Scilipoti: Valeant Manipulated Accounting and Ran Fraudulent Pharmacy Network
“If you look deeper, they were just manipulating the accounting and changing the pricing on, on drugs and creating a fraudulent network of online pharmacies.”
Parrish: Most Share Buybacks Merely Cover Up Stock Option Dilution
“You know, if you look at most buybacks, they're just covering up stock options.”
Hetty Green Loaned Over $6M to Save Texas Banks in 1907
“Her son, Ned, revealed years later that during the 19 oh seven panic, Hetty had loaned over six million in Texas alone in addition to her New York loans. She single-handedly kept several banks from failing, prevented numerous businesses from going under, and h…”
Hetty Green Never Exploited Her Leverage Over Borrowers or Counterparties
“Even when Hetty had a lot of leverage over other people, she never took advantage of them.”
Evans: AI labs do not continuously retrain models on live user queries
“They're not retraining the models all the time with the data. So you don't have that kind of runaway effect as, like, continuous flow and more queries produces, you know, better results.”
Johnson: Human brains have a specific neural pathway for attachment panic
“When we feel rejected and abandoned by the person we most depend on, There's a special pathway in our emotional brain, and it's reserved for attachment panic”
Johnson: Exclusive long-term relationships report highest sexual satisfaction and frequency
“The people who have, report having the best sex, have it most often, are most satisfied with it, and find it most thrilling, are people in a long-term, stable, connected, exclusive relationship.”
FedMart paying double competitor wages in 1957 resulted in lower operating costs
“The San Antonio retailers paid 50 cents an hour in 1957. Saul paid a dollar. Let's look at what happened. Employees could afford health care and dignity. Communities got stable families, not desperate workers. FedMart attracted the best people with near zero t…”